How much will it cost to go to a South African university in 2016?

South African students made history in October by forcing the government to put a moratorium on tuition fee increases for 2016. This means students should pay the same in 2016 as they paid in 2015. Here is a round-up of first-year fees.

The 17 traditional and comprehensive universities offer traditional academically oriented degrees, such as Bachelor of Arts (BA), Bachelor of Science (BSc) or Bachelor of Commerce (BComm). The universities of technology offer more career-oriented Bachelor of Technology (BTech) degrees – generally to students who have obtained a three-year national diploma. There are a huge number of BTech degrees, ranging from fashion and emergency medical care to extraction metallurgy.

A full list of the degrees and tuition fees published by the universities is available here.

The #feesmustfall movement started in the traditional universities, but students from the universities of technology and comprehensive universities joined in because the same financial pressures apply to students across all the tertiary education institutions.

Note: For practical reasons, Africa Check looked into the tuition fees for only the universities that offer traditional degrees. Of the 17 universities that offer these degrees, 11 published estimated yearly tuition fees for 2015 for the first year of study. It must be noted that these fees are estimates and can be used only as a guide to the cost of the first-year of a bachelor’s degree. A degree can be made up of a number of different subjects and those ultimately determine the yearly tuition fees. Universities often give two values for the estimated tuition fees for a degree: the upper and lower limits, to indicate the range within which a degree’s tuition fees for the year are likely to fall.

South Africa’s most expensive degree

The University of Cape Town’s Bachelor of Medicine (MBBCh) is the most expensive first-year degree out of the fees obtained by Africa Check to date. At R64,500, it costs R23,000 more than the first-year medicine degree offered by the University of the Free State.

In 2014, the University of Limpopo’s estimated tuition fee for a first-year medicine degree was the least expensive, at around R31,800. Africa Check was unable to obtain its fees for 2015 at the time of publishing, but if its MBBCh fees increase by the average 11% or less, it will remain the least expensive university for first-year medicine.

South Africa’s most expensive university

The three most expensive first-year degrees are all at the University of Cape Town (UCT): medicine is first, followed by two degrees that specialise in actuarial science, one a BBusSc and a BComm. These all cost more than R60,000 per year.

UCT also came out the most expensive when compared with the other universities on the cost of a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Science.

In fact, of the 31 degrees that were estimated to cost R50,000 or more for the first year of study, 20 were at UCT, nine were at the University of the Witwatersrand, one was at the University of Johannesburg (in the science faculty) and the last Stellenbosch University’s medicine degree.

Fee increases

Between 2014 and 2015 the estimated yearly tuition fees for the different degrees on offer increased by varying amounts. The MBBCh degrees increased by an average of 11% at four universities for which AfricaCheck obtained both 2014 and 2015 fees. This meant that UCT’s first-year medicine degree cost R6,500 more in 2015 than in 2014, for example.

At Wits, the tuition fees for first-year medicine have risen 24% since 2013, from R47,030 to R58,140 in 2015. That’s an increase of R11,110 over two years.

The fees information collected so far shows that the increases are not always uniform across all the degrees. For example, the lower range of a B Comm degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal increased by 25% (or nearly R8,000), whereas the University of Pretoria’s increased by only 4% (or R1,710).

Comment on this report

All of these numbers are, if I understand right, the published full tuition fees charged to rich students.

At least at UCT, the actual cost for many students is much lower. Here is the discussion of this emailed to all at the beginning of the protests: http://www.uct.ac.za/dailynews/?id=9400 . If this is accurate, poor students pay almost nothing, subsidised by the rich students whose fees you discuss above.

Charging parents who earn more than half a million a year 10% more to subsidise the children of cleaners seems like a pretty enlightened policy. But the marchers seem to prefer other stories.

I don’t know about other universities, presumably those with fewer rich students can do less cross-subsidising.

We have included the University of Venda – click on the uppermost circle in the map for study fees. However, the University of Zululand did not have a study fee guide available online at the time we researched this report. We will check again now.

If these #’s are correct and the Rand is in fact = .07 of the US dollar right now, your fees for ALL of the universities are unbelievably cheap even prior to any tuition cuts that are being asked for by students. In comparison a typical state run university in the United States might cost $32,000 dollars. This would include tuition and fees and room and board.= 448,000 rand per year for an undergraduate BA in the United States.

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